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Maggie is a high-school teenager who loves animals (especially her dog Mongo), and doesn't like her new step-father Val. But Maggie is far from normal. For one thing, the reason she dislikes Val is not just because he's from Oldworld or dresses terribly, but because he has too many shadows that seem to move on their own, and have too many legs or hands or other appendages, and that almost no one else can apparently see. For another thing, Maggie lives in Newworld, where magic is illegal and magic-using genes were removed two generations ago, and where there is a danger of "cohesion breaks," gaps in reality that are common enough they have their own slang term, "cobeys" - which the government handles with military teams and scientific equipment; but which just might be more of a problem than the government is letting on.

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Pullmann throws you into a fascinating new world and just lets you learn the details as the story goes along-- like the animal daemons that accompany each human, as life-long companions. Or the panserbjorne, the intelligent, armored polar bears who are mentioned a few times before we learn who and what they are. The story is a great adventure ride, and there are many fascinating characters - although the main character, Lyra, is pretty selfish and doesn't have qualms about lying. Lyra's uncle comes to visit the Oxford College where she has grown up (half-educated and mostly wild) and she gets to overhear (because she snuck in where she shouldn't be) about some of his research from the Arctic, involving "Dust." Soon, some of the children from the town go missing, and eventually Lyra decides she wants to help track them down, and go find her Uncle. Before she leaves Oxford, the Dean of the college gives her an "alethiometer" - a strange device with numerous symbols, which he says will tell the truth if she can learn to read it, and which is clearly the "golden compass" of the title (at least in the American version).

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